The Cut Scene - Video Game Blog by Variety

Why games need less externally imposed story (guest post by Justin Marks)

Editor's note: The following post is by film and videogame writer and friend of The Cut Scene Justin Marks. He wrote previously about his time modding "Halo 3" during the writers' strike and why Hollywood's isn't actually pissing all over our favorite games. All the opinions are his, especially the parts disagreeing with me.

My friend Ben Fritz, who writes for Variety.com's videogame blog The Cut Scene, had an interesting bone to pick recently with "Grand Theft Auto IV." In an essay titled "Narrative sophistication vs. open world," he mentioned the ever-present problem in these sandbox games when it comes to balancing a confined story with the fact that you can literally do just about anything:

How can players seriously believe Niko’s on a date when his girlfriend doesn’t mind that he’s carrying a knife, walking her through a 5-foot-deep pond and getting in numerous car accidents? Why can a distinctive-looking illegal immigrant commit hundreds of carjackings and nobody seems to care?

Basically, Ben is bothered by the fact that while you can do anything in the open world environment, the story actually operates on a very set track, going from plot point to plot point as if no one in Liberty City had any idea that you just spent the last two hours initiating a five-star police chase that culminated in your plunging a car off a bridge and then swimming back to a safe house. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated open world where Liberty City actually feels like a living and breathing universe, the game's rigid narrative structure is becoming a bit, well... tired.

But I don't mind the fact that "GTA's" gameplay sometimes bounces up against the narrative.  The question I want to explore is this: Why does my gameplay have to be constantly interrupted by this reductive thing called a story?

STORY AS ACCESSORY

Before we begin, let's call a spade a spade here. It's been a few weeks, we've all had a little perspective, and I think it's fair to admit that the game press may have jumped the gun a bit on their exuberance for "Grand Theft Auto IV's" storyline. Simon Parkin, in his Chewing Pixels column, was even bold enough to come clean about his hyperbole.  It's not, as IGN amazingly called it, "Oscar-caliber." The adventure of Niko Bellic, complete with its comic assortment of ethnic cliches, is pretty much on par with the rest of the franchise's self-conscious worship of movie archetypes and genre tropes. And there's nothing wrong with that. Rockstar has made clear that's all they've ever wanted to do, and they've done a damn fine job at that (although I do miss some of that charming humor from "Vice City" and "San Andreas"). 

The problem here is not the quality of the story, but the manner in which it is incorporated into the gameplay.  After skipping over countless cut scenes so I could get to the action, I slowly began to regard plot in "GTA IV" as being something akin to the Clinton marriage: why do they bother with the charade? Is there anyone in this country who honestly thinks these two people still sleep in the same bed?  After all the incredible advances in their game engine, why does Rockstar insist on making its story an accessory -- a needless, comparatively inferior element?

More to the point, how did narrative become such a side bar to the real point of gaming, i.e. our ability to play out our deepest fantasies in a virtual world?

THE "STAR WARS" ARCADE DAYS

In Jesper Juul's July 2001 essay "Games Telling Stories?," he discusses Atari's 1983 arcade version of "Star Wars," which utilized moving polygons in a flight simulator engine to re-create the famous third act of the movie:

The primary thing that encourages the player to connect game and movie is the title "Star Wars" on the machine and on the screen. If we imagine the title removed from the game, the connection would not be at all obvious. It would be a game where one should hit an "exhaust port" (or simply a square), and the player could note a similarity with a scene in Star Wars, but you would not be able to reconstruct the events in the movie from the game. The prehistory is missing, the rest of the movie, all personal relations.

In other words, he's saying that in the early days of limited graphics and reduced processing power, games had to resort to external packaging to inform the user as to what kind of world the narrative was taking place in. Strip away those accessories --- the words "Star Wars" on the outside of the console, the X-Wing-like cockpit, Obi Wan's voice playing on the speakers behind us --- and all you have is an abstract shooter involving lines and polygons. It could just as easily have been a game version of "The Last Starfighter" or even "Top Gun."  Story was simply an excuse to charge the gameplay with more meaning.

"GTA IV" AND "PORTAL"

But here we are today, in the era of the Playstation 3, and clearly we've got enough processing power to handle a firm integration of narrative and gameplay. Story must exist on a much more sophisticated level, right?

Not as much as you'd think.

Writers, executives, developers discuss whether videogames need writers

Not meaning to make today the day of guest posts, but I wanted to post a really interesting discussion that occurred on an e-mail group I'm a part of that involves gamers and Hollywood types. This one spun out of the infamous "Case against writers in the game industry" posted by Adam Maxwell at GamaSutra.

As a writer myself, you can probably imagine I'm not too sympathetic to Maxwell's argument. In fact, I think I make it a point in my reviews to focus on story, characters, humor and themes, much more than other game reviewers. Perhaps that's why I'm a little more positive in my reviews of titles like "Kane and Lynch" and "The Simpsons Game" and a little harder on "Super Mario Galaxy" and "Rainbow Six Vegas 2" than most other critics.

But let's hear what some other smart people had to say. Everyone involved gave me permission to copy their posts, without identifying information, of course. Some are edited a bit for space, non-pertinent info, etc.:

Michael Strode (writer):

All your base are belong to us.

The article's author clearly prefers sandbox-style games, and that's fine, but even the broadest sandbox game needs a central spine, something to feel like you're achieving a main goal (having finally finished Oblivion after 280 hours, I feel qualified to speak to that).  The author calls Bioshock a "railroaded experience."  Railroaded into a series of fantastic plot twists?  Without the quality writing in Oblivion, would I have felt guilty about acting in a way that led to a minor character's death?  I actually
felt guilty!  Sure, I'm not a fan of interminable cutscenes, but the solution to that is to integrate the plot almost entirely into the gameplay (as with Bioshock), not to ditch the writer who came up with the plot,
characters, and dialogue.

My two cents as non-videogame writer.

Kellee Santiago (video game developer):

I'm a video game designer, and even I think this article is bullshit.

We've pulled in a writer on our current project, and for sure it has made a world of difference. Maybe the term "screenwriter" should revert to its true root: "storyteller," but either way, it's someone who specializes in crafting emotion. I think the games industry hasn't been using writers to their full capacity in simply giving them cut scenes and slots for dialogue to fill in.  Was Portal nominated for Best Writing just because of the voice over during the game? I don't think so. I think it was because of the combination
of the environment design, the voice-over, the signs on the wall, and the weighted companion cube. A writer knew how to pull all of the elements together to craft an experience.

My two cents as a video game designer.

Zach Schiff-Abrams (film development/production executive):

As a film producer I have drawn and quartered many a writer so usually I leap at the chance to jump on any bandwagon that is founded on lynching the writing community. Unfortunately this retard doesn't know his ass from his elbow, so here's my 15 cents:

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot."  Here's what's inherently wrong with this moron's argument.  Ask any self-respecting writer(and every fucking last one of them motherfuckers are self-respecting) what they do when they sit down to build a story and they'll tell you the first thing (and the most important thing) they do is create characters.  In fact, most good stories in any medium usually come from a landscape where the writer almost obsessively focuses on creating and developing characters in a vacuum that doesn't rely on any plot.  There are no good fucking plots, there are only interesting characters that inform a plot...

What I have been arguing for years upon years is that videogames desperately need more writing.  And now we're finally at a level technologically speaking where we can actually integrate the creation of character into the very fabric of the gameplay experience.  You still argue?  You think GTA is a successful franchise?  Think how much more successful it would actually be if Alvin Sargent or Jonathan Lethem was taking seriously the creation of character in that world?  Then you wouldn't have Fritzy writing about how videogames are challenging movies for the media dollar, then my nerdy friends, then there wouldn't be any more movies.

Instead you have this dweeb and unfortunately way too many of his kind running the videogame industry that think in way too small of a box.   

Justin Marks (screenwriter):

Yeah as a movie and occasional game writer obviously I find these arguments patently absurd, but then I have to realize this is still a business in such a mainstream narrative infancy that critics hail Mass   
Effect for having a great story simply because it has a story at all. Meanwhile, Portal introduces so many narrative innovations it could make a filmmaker's head spin and few people notice (ie, Halo 3 still   
tops most people's lists last year).

The amazing thing to me is the way the gaming press, Mr. Fritz excluded of course, heralds how "emotional" a game like Mass Effect is just because you can visually see emotions on the characters' faces. Basically they're saying that emotional response has a direct correlation to how realistic the graphics are, while missing the point completely that we were way more attached to the Companion Cube or Agro the Horse from Shadow of the Colossus than we will ever be to some hot alien lesbian with a well-rendered face.  And that's all a direct result of story.  Movies learned a long time ago what makes characters sympathetic.  When will games learn that character empathy (ie, turning us into one of the players in the story) is entirely different from sympathy (ie, showing us why we should care about the people we're watching)?

Until then nothing shocks me. I still think there are a lot of developers out there who are starting to get it.  The sad thing is, Maxwell is kind of right.  The way most developers hire writers, they do serve a pointless role.  That's not fault of the writer.  Big publisher-based developers have got to get over the whole practice of throwing a lot of money at a screenwriter and then just having them sit down and write dialogue.  Of course they're going to be useless when they're applied that way.  Nobody plays a game for the dialogue.  Writers don't have a magic touch because they've got to fill in a few story blanks to get you from one boss to another.  They bring what they can to the table as storytellers, and deserve a place next to any game designer.

Anyway, obviously a touchy subject for me, but my two cents from what I've seen.

Guest column: Why Hollywood isn't actually pissing all over our favorite games

[Note: Screenwriter Justin Marks, a friend of The Cut Scene, is back with another guest column. This one, cross-posted on GameSetWatch, is about why Hollywood's relationship with the videogame world isn't nearly as dysfuncational as many people think... and why we could see some good movies based on games coming soon.]

I remember when the new STREET FIGHTER movie was first announced.  The internet went ballistic.  And not necessarily in a good way.

On the very same day that someone was green-lighting a reboot of a franchise already believed to bear the mark of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Peter Jackson announced that his adaptation of HALO, a daring game series, was being dropped by the major Hollywood studios.  Boy, these guys just can't get it right.  They dump HALO and give us another STREET FIGHTER movie. Unbelievable.

Well, to quickly answer this criticism in biased terms, STREET FIGHTER isn't your ordinary game adaptation.  It's a gritty, realistic character piece (if I don't say so myself) that just happens to use characters taken from a video game.  All hype aside, it's going to be a very different game-to-movie adaptation and I urge everyone to go see it when it comes out next year.

But I don't want to talk about STREET FIGHTER right now.  It's worth discussing because I genuinely believe the producers on that film got it right, but maybe in another column.  For now I want to address a much larger issue that faces the gaming community... how to deal with this perception that Hollywood is pissing all over our favorite properties.

The relationship between games and movies is a tough one.  I've seen it firsthand.  As a lifelong gamer who was fortunate enough to find a corner in the screenwriting community, I've often straddled both sides of this fence.

For starters, and I hate to say this, but the fanboys used to be right.  There was a time when the movie business just didn't get video games.  No one had yet grown up on them. Filmmakers saw games as inane and often shallow experiences that didn't deserve serious treatment.  Thinking back to DOUBLE DRAGON or SUPER MARIO BROTHERS (shudder), it's not hard to see what the problem was.  The users of these games were pre-adolescent children (or teenagers who acted like them), so why should we make a serious movie for them?

But things have gotten better over the years.  A lot better.  Contrary to the message-board-driven fantasy that "Hollywood is screwing up my childhood," this mystical "Hollywood" is actually a real place, filled with executives and creative people who are now young enough to have grown up during the Golden Age of Nintendo.  I know this because I work with these people every day and play with them on Xbox Live every night.  I call it the Nerd Hollywood.  They're genuinely smart people.  And they genuinely want to make good movies.

For an analogy, think about the state of comic book movies a little more than ten years ago.  Before BLADE came out, nobody believed that comic books could be taken seriously.  Now we have franchises like X-MEN and BATMAN BEGINS.  That's because the people making those movies grew up on comics and knew they should be considered an adult medium.  The new generation had taken over.

And that's what's ready to happen in the world of game-to-film adaptations.  I'm not saying you should expect MARIO BEGINS in theaters anytime soon, but the time is upon us for some hot and heavy game movies.

And yet here's the rub.  The gaming world isn't holding up its end of the bargain.  Fans (and publishers, to some extent) are still resisting Hollywood with territorial reluctance, thinking that if they give away a game's rights to a studio, Hollywood will inevitably "piss all over our childhood."  Part of this is because there's been a past pattern.  That's fair.  But it's also because the game community fundamentally believes filmmakers just don't understand why games are so great, and if they would only directly and literally translate a game to film, it would succeed beyond all expectations.

Frankly, in the case of most games, this is just not true.  We all need to take a long look in the mirror and realize that there are very few mainstream game franchises that could stand next to the best comics of the 1980's, or the best movies ever.  And yes, SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS and PORTAL are hands-down better than most anything out there, but no one is playing those games.  What is the mainstream audience playing? HALO 3.

So let's talk about HALO.

First of all, I love the HALO franchise.  Master Chief's action figure is sitting on my desk right now as I type.  For any doubters out there, simply click here. HALO is the gold standard for our community.  Ethereal, epic, with great setpieces and some wonderful aesthetics.  We should all be so lucky as to make a game as good as that.

Master Chief has been trying to make it to the big screen for a few years now.  I've read the scripts. Some of them aren't bad.  But Hollywood, even Nerd Hollywood, has failed to green-light this film.  And it's not like they're throwing a bunch of hacks at it.  We're talking about Peter Jackson.  He's no slouch.  If they won't make HALO with Peter Jackson producing, clearly Hollywood is just out of touch with what the world wants, right?

Think of how great a HALO movie would be if they made it exactly like the game was (which is part of the deal Bungie has fought for).  Imagine showing up to the theater on Friday night to see the first showing.  Fade in.  Outer space.  A giant star cruiser sails into frame, dropping from it a flying convoy that descends into an alien planet's outer atmosphere.  We touch down in a foreign world and the door slams open.  Badass space marines jump out, pulse rifles locked, cocked, and ready to rock.  They engage in some funny banter, then march into a futuristic complex built by a community that's since disappeared.  After a few suspenseful minutes of "what the hell happened here?", the creatures start appearing.  Nasty aliens, who don't take no for an answer, begin to tear the space marines apart.  A wild gunfight ensues.

Sounds like a pretty cool movie, right?

That's because it already was a movie.  I just described the opening hour of James Cameron's ALIENS.

Ready for some heresy?  As great a game as HALO is, and as much as it deserves to be a true benchmark for this industry's success, when you take away the awesome gameplay and reduce it to character and story, we've really seen it before.  Don't start screaming on the message boards yet.  Take a long, hard look, because this is true of a lot of popular games out there.  On a story level, they often take place in familiar worlds and lack the character work (read: compelling enough to make a movie star want to be in the movie) that would elevate them above the level of a good genre film.

Peter Jackson probably has a bold vision for HALO, but he's going to have to do some bold-re-envisioning to make it work.  The standards that make a good game (complex sci-fi world, silent hero, more emphasis on repetitive action) are not the same standards that make a good movie.  Neither standard is inherently better or worse --- they're just different.  And that means a film adaptation can't just be a carbon copy of its source material.  It has to be inspired, sometimes with new ideas.  To inject these new ideas, the filmmakers risk pissing off fans who want the movie to be exactly what the game was.  And thus begins message board backlash.  Hence the Catch-22.

Why does the movie have to reach more than just the gamer audience? Because movies cost an awful lot of money to make.  HALO alone would cost roughly $200 million.  To gain its gross back, you'd have to generate about half a billion dollars' worth of revenue.  HALO 3, the game, made $170 million in 24 hours.  Break that down and it comes to roughly 2.8 million rabid fans lining up to buy it.  Multiply 2.8 million fans by the average cost of a movie ticket, 10 dollars, and you have an opening weekend of $28 million.  Let's even be generous and say half those guys brought a date.  $40 million opening weekend.  Spend $200 million dollars on that and you're looking at one of the biggest flops since ISHTAR.  People lose jobs.  Game over.

If HALO were to be a success --- and Peter Jackson's a smart guy, he knows this --- it's got to be more than a genre film. It's got to appeal to a much bigger audience than just us hardcore gamers.  Girls have got to see it.  Our parents have got to see it. They've got to see it twice.  And take the whole family.

So how do we solve this problem?   

We've got to look at adaptations as what they are... an opportunity to adjust the source material to suit it to a new medium.  A chance to take a great game and make it into a great movie.  That means as a game community, we've got to be open to new ideas being applied to properties that we consider perfect as-is.  And as a film community, we've got to be willing to take more risks.  To believe that a game should be considered art, and that a movie should honor that. 

A new generation of filmmakers is emerging, and this generation takes the medium seriously enough to realize all game adaptations don't deserve to be treated like ALONE IN THE DARK.  But it takes time.  And patience.  And maybe the corpses of a few experiments gone wrong.  So as a young filmmaker speaking to the very gamer population that birthed him, I say please hold on.  The best is yet to come, and we all need to be patient because the right formula isn't as obvious as we would like to think.

And hey, I may be biased, but I think the new STREET FIGHTER movie is the right start.  Maybe in a future column we can talk about other qualities I believe would make for a good game-to-film adaptation.  For now, just consider me a self-promotional jerk.